Eric is now an adjuct at Olin College of Engineering. They started in 2001 but have quickly grown in prominence due to their willingness to try new teaching methods.

He teaches the computer architecture class and 1 hour seminars (2014 coursebook here). The current one is called, “DANGER: High Voltage” and a previous one was about power supplies in a practical manner.

This reminded Chris of classes by past guests Larry Sears (at CWRU) and Kent Lundberg (also at Olin). Former guest Ian Daniher was also a student at Olin (one of Eric’s students, actually).

He stopped designing toys after responding to an email snarkily from his alma mater (Olin), which helped him land a job as an adjunct.

From there, he teamed up with James Whong (while he was at Boston Dynamics) and started designing a measurement platform that could be used on robots that are moving around. This became the mooshimeter.

“Mooshim” is a Zen Buddhist phrase meaning heart without heart. Eric lived in Tokyo for a while and understood more of the cultural meanings vs the straight translation.

Comments

Mould static is from the plastic being injected and rubbing against the rest of the material and the mould. Moulds are hard wearing alloy steel, often you cut the recesses with a spark erosion etcher, and then polish with diamond paste and a purpose made tool to get a mirror finish on the inside of the mould to get a good external finish.

Often when the mould wears slightly the inner lining is built up with a hard chrome coating or a spray metal coat to get it back in tolerance. Depending on the desired tolerance and how much wear is acceptable in the mould ( if you do not care you can tolerate a lot of wear and flash on edges) you can get well over a million cycles on it, though the ejector pins and springs will likely only last around 100 000 cycles before you replace them with new. Standard parts, available off the shelf for a lot of those, but you often customise them with a mould or production identifier etched into the end for QC.

The plastic used has a large effect on mould life as well, most are either abrasive when hot, or the fillers used to improve properties ( plasticisers for flexibility, or chalk dust or flour used to increase stiffness, or powdered glass in GRP materials) are incredibly abrasive, and most of the plastics used degrade with heat releasing either HCl, HCN or other corrosive gases or liquids that erode the mould, or corrode the entire area.

Regarding the linear power supply, why does the temperature coefficient go from positive to negative when using a zener instead of regular diode?

Unrelated, but with the Pozible campaign over, where can I buy the uRuler? Or should I just get it made with SeedStudio/dorkbotpdx/Oshpark/Itead/etc? BTW, I know Adafruit has a similar ruler, however they’ve been out of stock for a while. Similar to the uCurrentGold that’s out of stock.

Google Translate doesn’t seem to translate Mooshi to German.

In case anyone’s interested, here’s some highlights from the Wearable World Accelerator that happened recently in the bay area: